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Visuality and Memories: A Way of Seeing

January 27, 2019

Experiencing

affect, experience, memory, nostalgia, seeing, vision, visuality

The term “visuality” might at first appear obscure. We define visuality as “the quality or state of being visible or visual”. This definition might actually make you wonder, why didn’t I simply use the term “visibility”?

However, I like what “visuality” conveys. It’s not merely the quality or state of being visible/visual, as the dictionaries inform us. Rather, I see visuality as a philosophy of seeing.

That’s an impossible weight for a humble word to carry, and doubly so because this is simply the way I choose to see the word. Guess what, however? That’s precisely what I’ll be talking about in this article: the subjective rendering of reality through visual representation.

visuality and memory
The visuality of this scene is not merely what is visible in it, but what I render (=see and remember)
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Too many Photos, not enough Experiences

March 12, 2018

Experiencing

experience, life, mediocrity, nostalgia, photos, social media, time

I’ve said in the past how memory is everything for a writer. More importantly, however, it’s precisely the memorable experience that is useful for authors. In other words, experiencing something that affects you helps create an image of the experience. This mental image, though accessible only by and through your mind, is very vivid and powerful in terms of affect. Perhaps it is its very nature – abstract, rare, living its ghostly existence only in your consciousness – that gives it its power. Compare that with the modern habit of taking too many photos without the experiences associated with them.

It’s insidious.

I doubt – though nowadays, you never know – you took actual photos during your first date with your loved one. Which one do you remember the best, particularly in terms of affect? The first date from ten years ago with zero photos or a vacation four years ago with hundreds of actual photos (and plenty more selfies)?

Taking too many photos without the experiences the photos refer to renders them both meaningless. Let’s see why, and it’s particularly from an author’s standpoint I’m examining this. It all began… with a dream.

too many photos, not enough experiences
I’m using this image to connote the concept of “memorable experience”. But from the couple’s own perspective, the only image of their experience worth having is the one in their minds
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Coffee, Summer Afternoons, and Greece

March 6, 2018

Experiencing

coffee, creativity, experience, life, musings, nostalgia, time

Today’s article is more like a stream-of-consciousness exercise. Expect it to be nonsensical, incoherent, or just simply obscure. If it has to have a topic, let that be coffee, summer afternoons, and Greece. I can’t begin to describe how many memories, thoughts, and feelings this deceptively innocent combination brings to me. These musings I called “timeless”, but I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean it literally: these musings, in actual fact, are outside time altogether.

They are timeless because they are connected neither casually nor temporally, but through affect, meaning, and… coffee. I said in my article on timelessness and experience:

There is an abstract reality hidden beyond the – largely illusory – veil of time, which connects you as a child to you as an adult. It also connects both those “yous” with all other “yous” that have or will ever have existed.

coffee, summer afternoons, Greece
Greek coffee; a grain of sand of the beach which is my memories
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